It was for a recruitment contract in totality for a decade (total £622m) including all efforts to recruit for the UK army, including everything that involves... of which a small part was the website but it was supposed to be integrated into everything and included running the old legacy system in parallel for a long while..
The whole contract was actually £1.36bn over 10 years (NAO report, p.2), and the £113m covered the new online recruitment system (including the costs of running the old system longer than expected) and was triple the budget (p.6).
actually it was, the whole recruitment contract was for £495m, of which £113 went on the website
from the NAO summary:
> The Army initially expected to launch the new online system in July 2013.
As we reported in 2014, the Department failed to meet its contractual obligations to provide the IT infrastructure to host Capita’s recruitment software. In January 2014, the Army passed responsibility for developing the whole system to Capita. After a series of delays, Capita launched the system in November 2017. The Army spent £113 million developing the new system and running the legacy system longer than expected. This was triple the original budget. Capita funded development of the new system and the costs of running the legacy systems from July 2015
Capita's nick name is Crapita in the UK which tells you what you need to know.
I am sure my current (small) employer could have done better I could spec the architecture for a the site (I have worked many large related sites ) recruit a few extra good devs and bobs your uncle.
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I'm not calling out the developers, I'm sure they didn't get £113m, but where did it go?
The two comments you've quoted are literally the only comments that indicate hacks or broken things in the entire HTML source of the linked page. There are other comments, but they are innocuous descriptive comments and not indications of problems - things like:
<!-- Adobe Analytics script (2 of 2) -->
Saying it is "full of" comments "like" the ones you've quoted is just plain not true.
Imagine you need to create a website with every minor technical details perfectly matches the client's requirement. The client has no technical knowledge at all but he insist to be in charge on everything.
It's impossible to judge from the information in the article whether this is an absurd and unjustifiable waste of money or not. It doesn't tell us anything about the requirements, only that the project was to build "a website".
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is a website. Facebook is also a website. Spending £113m to build Motherfucking Website is insane; spending £113m to build Facebook is a bargain.
As other commenters here noted, we can easily imagine extremely complicated requirements. The backend requirements for a "recruitment website" for the military might include all sorts of background checks, including pulling criminal records and automatically trawling social media for content posted by candidates and doing NLP analysis on it to detect warning signs of extremism. There might be some sophisticated proprietary analytics portal for monitoring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. And while there might be a good writeup elsewhere on the web on what exactly this project consisted of, and I'd welcome relevant links, based purely on the content of the article we just don't know.
Calling it a "website" without giving any hint of the requirements makes it sound like the army paid £113m for the digital equivalent of a recruitment brochure, yet I seriously doubt that's the real story here. I'd expect HN commenters to be more skeptical of these kinds of portrayals, rather than uncritically accepting the media narrative.
I think everyone here assumes that Capita actually tried to use the 113 million and so they are confused as to why the website is so poor. It’s much more likely that about 10 million was spent on the website and the balance lined the pockets of various people in government and at Capita.
These projects are incredibly complex that fail for a variety of reasons, most of them to do with politics, conflicting requirements, too many stakeholders and decision makers, and too many people with little to no interest in or grasp of the technology involved.
First and foremost the lesson should be that the army should have its own dedicated IT department.
Also, any company peddling 'digital transformation' should be a red flag to start with.
"army should have its own dedicated IT department"
I'm sure they did at one point - I remember hearing a talk at a conference from someone who handled their salary side of things maybe 5/6 years ago. He was talking about the difficulties they had in managing master data (e.g. how many people actually work for them) and came across rather well.
"Outsourcing giant Capita was awarded the £495m contract for Army recruitment in 2012 - but has failed to hit soldier recruitment targets every year since."
There's your problem, you gave it to Capita.
The whole PFI model relies on the pipedream of being able to just hand a piece of paper over from the Minister's desk detailing what they want, as if they were sending the intern out to buy milk, and magically getting the right thing back. In practice it requires all sorts of complexity and control; the project management is actually harder than just straightforwardly doing it inhouse, agility is impossible, and the opportunities for cost inflation are huge.
There is no real penalty for failure, and no real competitive market since the tendering process is so complex and expensive, and in any case the relevant small number of firms already have the Minister on speed-dial. Besides, the outsourcing inevitably ends up "too big to fail", in that when a bankruptcy does happen like Carillion the state has to take over the cost of sorting it out anyway.
I wonder if the article is omitting information about the requirements.
I mean, if the website is actually a portal that on top of the UI has some automation. Eg, once an application is submitted, it runs some sort of background check to asses whether the candidate meets requirement. Think about listing previous disputes with the law, problems with authorities, mental health problems, ties with extremists/other governments, ... .
I can imagine the nightmare it would be to integrate with these N systems that are probably ancient, poorly maintained, and the people knowing how to handle them are extremely scarce.
The administrative overhead of doing a government project is very, very high. I imagine that the time and effort spent on activity/progress reports totally eclipsed the amount of time spent on the product. And the report-writers, the people best placed to do something about the waste, aren't particularly motivated to fix it.
> "Capita has consistently missed the Army's recruitment targets, with the total shortfall ranging from 21% to 45%, the NAO said."
Not to get off topic but...Did Capita miss the targets, or have the proles simply become wise to the ways of the powerful ruling elites? A pitch of "serve your country" certainly doesn't have the truth / appeal that it once had.
> "The Commons Defence Committee was told in October that the Army currently has 77,000 fully trained troops, compared with a target of 82,500."
Now drilling down a bit...5,500 short? That's not even 10%. The raw number looks large-ish, but as a percentage (while short) doesn't feel unreasonable (in a real world sense).
Alternatively, it's a whole brigade short, and only slightly less than the total number of troops deployed overseas. It's not a great situation to be in given all the talk about civil contingencies planning or Ukraine-Russia incidents.
Difficult to say how effective the nationalism is. I see a lot more "support our troops" than I used to, but it's been effectively monopolised by the right. I suspect the problem is the Army wants trained specialists a lot more than cannon fodder, and is unable to make competitive offers here.
As a former Capita person who has worked with a few clients in the public space, they absolutely didn't underestimate anything.
They wrote a contract full of wiggle room and loopholes that they could then feign ignorance over yet allowed them to constantly exaggerate and charge for the most minor of "misunderstandings" in implementation.
What the hell - how? They're not launching a moon mission, it's a website. Unless it's the next Facebook I'm not sure how they can imagine it could possibly be worth that much.
But perhaps there's something I'm missing having only made website of the order of 100,000 times cheaper than that.
Read that as, 'Capita didn't care too much to manage requirements and sanitize them but instead realised that they would get some sweet dough by stringing it out'
The Army initially attempted to develop the IT infrastructure
The Department approved the Programme on the basis that the Army would use its existing IT infrastructure to host the online system. In 2012, the Department was therefore responsible for developing the IT infrastructure to achieve this. Capita was responsible for developing the new online system. As we reported in 2014, the Department encountered problems with the delivery of the IT infrastructure, and
deadlines were repeatedly missed.
The main problems were that the Department:
• Had to manage a relationship between two providers who had no contractual relationship with each other;
• Underestimated the complexity of what it was trying to achieve and, consequently, the resources required to manage the risks; and
• Had an Army project management team that was inexperienced and under-resourced.
The Army originally intended to introduce the new online recruitment system by July 2013. In December 2013, it accepted that its approach had not worked and passed responsibility for implementing the whole approach – the hosting infrastructure and the online recruitment system – to Capita. The Department’s Accounting Officer accepted that the failure to manage the dependencies between the Atlas and Capita contracts
was ‘unacceptable’.
Capita took responsibility for developing the online system.
Capita initially intended to use an ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial system but underestimated the complexity of the Army’s requirements. It found the level of customisation needed to support the three Armed Services’ recruitment processes meant that an off-the-shelf system was not a viable technical solution. In February 2015, it therefore began to develop a new bespoke system.
Capita then encountered problems developing the new application and missed launch deadlines in July 2015, April 2016 and April 2017. The main problems involved the scale of the three Armed Services’ processes and requirements, and the number of interfaces with other IT systems. For example, the Armed Forces have over 250 job roles, each with its own eligibility criteria and rules, which means a new Army candidate can have 27 possible pathways through the recruitment process. Capita told us that these requirements made system development more complex than standard online recruitment systems.
The UK government developed a project management methodology called Prince 2. Which has a lot of similarities to, and is compatible with, agile. The rights to the methodology are jointly owned by the UK government and Capita, the contractor involved in this screw up.
1yr was wasted trying to convert an online web application the US use for recruitment to work for the UK. I heard it was doomed in numerous ways, especially being cloud based (not a good idea to have all the personal data on new recruits hosted offsite). How it was ever chosen defies belief.
The next year was spent building a bespoke app using a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool. Failed and abandoned after 12mths. How it was ever chosen defies belief.
The next 18mths was spent building a bespoke app with a different RAD tool (K2) supposedly that would enable catching up on the previous lost 2yrs by cutting lots of corners and doing 3 yrs work in 9mths. It was the wrong tool for the job and was never going to work. Management were told many times, and why, but they would just ignore it and tell us to carry on. They hired every K2 developer available on the market in the UK, but they seemed to be only used to building small apps in one or two person teams, whereas many of us were used to working in large teams building large complex systems. The K2 devs were considered the 'gurus' and everytime we raised the issues management would go and ask the K2 guys, and of course, they would dismiss our issues (often quite arrogantly) to protect their product. After 18mths it became clear, we were proven right and K2 was abandoned.
In all this time, the entire management was completely replaced 3 times. None seemed to have any experience in how to build a software application or website. They would make the most astounding statements that concerned many of us that they had no idea how to build not just a complex system like this, but any software application at all. We were told we werent allowed to talk to the project 'architects', and we later found out they were told not to talk to us (an instant recipe for failure by itself). When we did get to talk to them (unofficially) we soon realised why, they were also clueless. Next they tried bringing in external management, but they were just as clueless and didnt seem to know what to do either.
Of course the application was going to be large and complex, but was quite achievable if people who knew what they were doing were in charge. In my opinion the root problem is the same as in many other companies that develop software systems (and often the root cause of the many data hacks we see on the news): management who have no technical background choose the wrong tools for the job, hire incompetent numpties who dont understand software technology to do the work, and constantly try and cut corners you shouldn't cut to save time and/or money.
Even when a project is behind you should be able to say how much you have actually have completed, 10%, 20%, something (especially with 400+ people on it), but it always seemed nothing was ever considered 'complete'. We often said 3 x 10 person teams who knew what they were doing, with the correct architecture and development tools, could have built a working system in 12-18mths.
Reading the report, I find it repulsive the financial penalties have been reduced to keep Capita 'motivated'. Our armed forces deserve better. With all the cost cutting they endure, they need to recruit quickly and efficiently and fill 100% of positions they have to maintain an effective defence of our country.
[+] [-] buro9|7 years ago|reply
It was for a recruitment contract in totality for a decade (total £622m) including all efforts to recruit for the UK army, including everything that involves... of which a small part was the website but it was supposed to be integrated into everything and included running the old legacy system in parallel for a long while..
The details are in the report https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Investigat...
But the headline is not the story.
[+] [-] pmyteh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grahamel|7 years ago|reply
from the NAO summary:
> The Army initially expected to launch the new online system in July 2013. As we reported in 2014, the Department failed to meet its contractual obligations to provide the IT infrastructure to host Capita’s recruitment software. In January 2014, the Army passed responsibility for developing the whole system to Capita. After a series of delays, Capita launched the system in November 2017. The Army spent £113 million developing the new system and running the legacy system longer than expected. This was triple the original budget. Capita funded development of the new system and the costs of running the legacy systems from July 2015
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Investigat...
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
I am sure my current (small) employer could have done better I could spec the architecture for a the site (I have worked many large related sites ) recruit a few extra good devs and bobs your uncle.
[+] [-] sefrost|7 years ago|reply
Is this the website?
The HTML is full of comments like:
I'm not calling out the developers, I'm sure they didn't get £113m, but where did it go?[+] [-] XCabbage|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezoe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2455|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XCabbage|7 years ago|reply
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is a website. Facebook is also a website. Spending £113m to build Motherfucking Website is insane; spending £113m to build Facebook is a bargain.
As other commenters here noted, we can easily imagine extremely complicated requirements. The backend requirements for a "recruitment website" for the military might include all sorts of background checks, including pulling criminal records and automatically trawling social media for content posted by candidates and doing NLP analysis on it to detect warning signs of extremism. There might be some sophisticated proprietary analytics portal for monitoring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. And while there might be a good writeup elsewhere on the web on what exactly this project consisted of, and I'd welcome relevant links, based purely on the content of the article we just don't know.
Calling it a "website" without giving any hint of the requirements makes it sound like the army paid £113m for the digital equivalent of a recruitment brochure, yet I seriously doubt that's the real story here. I'd expect HN commenters to be more skeptical of these kinds of portrayals, rather than uncritically accepting the media narrative.
[+] [-] wsgeek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martijn_himself|7 years ago|reply
First and foremost the lesson should be that the army should have its own dedicated IT department.
Also, any company peddling 'digital transformation' should be a red flag to start with.
[+] [-] arethuza|7 years ago|reply
I'm sure they did at one point - I remember hearing a talk at a conference from someone who handled their salary side of things maybe 5/6 years ago. He was talking about the difficulties they had in managing master data (e.g. how many people actually work for them) and came across rather well.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
There's your problem, you gave it to Capita.
The whole PFI model relies on the pipedream of being able to just hand a piece of paper over from the Minister's desk detailing what they want, as if they were sending the intern out to buy milk, and magically getting the right thing back. In practice it requires all sorts of complexity and control; the project management is actually harder than just straightforwardly doing it inhouse, agility is impossible, and the opportunities for cost inflation are huge.
There is no real penalty for failure, and no real competitive market since the tendering process is so complex and expensive, and in any case the relevant small number of firms already have the Minister on speed-dial. Besides, the outsourcing inevitably ends up "too big to fail", in that when a bankruptcy does happen like Carillion the state has to take over the cost of sorting it out anyway.
[+] [-] arethuza|7 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46505688
[+] [-] kerrsclyde|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timthorn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcyb5st|7 years ago|reply
I mean, if the website is actually a portal that on top of the UI has some automation. Eg, once an application is submitted, it runs some sort of background check to asses whether the candidate meets requirement. Think about listing previous disputes with the law, problems with authorities, mental health problems, ties with extremists/other governments, ... .
I can imagine the nightmare it would be to integrate with these N systems that are probably ancient, poorly maintained, and the people knowing how to handle them are extremely scarce.
That would justify the price, IMHO.
[+] [-] javajosh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmca|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|7 years ago|reply
> "Capita has consistently missed the Army's recruitment targets, with the total shortfall ranging from 21% to 45%, the NAO said."
Not to get off topic but...Did Capita miss the targets, or have the proles simply become wise to the ways of the powerful ruling elites? A pitch of "serve your country" certainly doesn't have the truth / appeal that it once had.
> "The Commons Defence Committee was told in October that the Army currently has 77,000 fully trained troops, compared with a target of 82,500."
Now drilling down a bit...5,500 short? That's not even 10%. The raw number looks large-ish, but as a percentage (while short) doesn't feel unreasonable (in a real world sense).
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
Difficult to say how effective the nationalism is. I see a lot more "support our troops" than I used to, but it's been effectively monopolised by the right. I suspect the problem is the Army wants trained specialists a lot more than cannon fodder, and is unable to make competitive offers here.
[+] [-] myspy|7 years ago|reply
Classic :D
[+] [-] weego|7 years ago|reply
They wrote a contract full of wiggle room and loopholes that they could then feign ignorance over yet allowed them to constantly exaggerate and charge for the most minor of "misunderstandings" in implementation.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|7 years ago|reply
But perhaps there's something I'm missing having only made website of the order of 100,000 times cheaper than that.
[+] [-] zimpenfish|7 years ago|reply
e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/12/capita-fail...
And an older summary: http://davespartblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/why-it-gets-called...
(See also Private Eye passim)
[+] [-] lbriner|7 years ago|reply
They should have capped the price up-front.
[+] [-] Traster|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabricexpert|7 years ago|reply
The Army initially attempted to develop the IT infrastructure
The Department approved the Programme on the basis that the Army would use its existing IT infrastructure to host the online system. In 2012, the Department was therefore responsible for developing the IT infrastructure to achieve this. Capita was responsible for developing the new online system. As we reported in 2014, the Department encountered problems with the delivery of the IT infrastructure, and deadlines were repeatedly missed.
The main problems were that the Department: • Had to manage a relationship between two providers who had no contractual relationship with each other; • Underestimated the complexity of what it was trying to achieve and, consequently, the resources required to manage the risks; and • Had an Army project management team that was inexperienced and under-resourced.
The Army originally intended to introduce the new online recruitment system by July 2013. In December 2013, it accepted that its approach had not worked and passed responsibility for implementing the whole approach – the hosting infrastructure and the online recruitment system – to Capita. The Department’s Accounting Officer accepted that the failure to manage the dependencies between the Atlas and Capita contracts was ‘unacceptable’.
Capita took responsibility for developing the online system.
Capita initially intended to use an ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial system but underestimated the complexity of the Army’s requirements. It found the level of customisation needed to support the three Armed Services’ recruitment processes meant that an off-the-shelf system was not a viable technical solution. In February 2015, it therefore began to develop a new bespoke system.
Capita then encountered problems developing the new application and missed launch deadlines in July 2015, April 2016 and April 2017. The main problems involved the scale of the three Armed Services’ processes and requirements, and the number of interfaces with other IT systems. For example, the Armed Forces have over 250 job roles, each with its own eligibility criteria and rules, which means a new Army candidate can have 27 possible pathways through the recruitment process. Capita told us that these requirements made system development more complex than standard online recruitment systems.
[+] [-] known|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robjan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcv2|7 years ago|reply
The next year was spent building a bespoke app using a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool. Failed and abandoned after 12mths. How it was ever chosen defies belief.
The next 18mths was spent building a bespoke app with a different RAD tool (K2) supposedly that would enable catching up on the previous lost 2yrs by cutting lots of corners and doing 3 yrs work in 9mths. It was the wrong tool for the job and was never going to work. Management were told many times, and why, but they would just ignore it and tell us to carry on. They hired every K2 developer available on the market in the UK, but they seemed to be only used to building small apps in one or two person teams, whereas many of us were used to working in large teams building large complex systems. The K2 devs were considered the 'gurus' and everytime we raised the issues management would go and ask the K2 guys, and of course, they would dismiss our issues (often quite arrogantly) to protect their product. After 18mths it became clear, we were proven right and K2 was abandoned.
In all this time, the entire management was completely replaced 3 times. None seemed to have any experience in how to build a software application or website. They would make the most astounding statements that concerned many of us that they had no idea how to build not just a complex system like this, but any software application at all. We were told we werent allowed to talk to the project 'architects', and we later found out they were told not to talk to us (an instant recipe for failure by itself). When we did get to talk to them (unofficially) we soon realised why, they were also clueless. Next they tried bringing in external management, but they were just as clueless and didnt seem to know what to do either.
Of course the application was going to be large and complex, but was quite achievable if people who knew what they were doing were in charge. In my opinion the root problem is the same as in many other companies that develop software systems (and often the root cause of the many data hacks we see on the news): management who have no technical background choose the wrong tools for the job, hire incompetent numpties who dont understand software technology to do the work, and constantly try and cut corners you shouldn't cut to save time and/or money.
Even when a project is behind you should be able to say how much you have actually have completed, 10%, 20%, something (especially with 400+ people on it), but it always seemed nothing was ever considered 'complete'. We often said 3 x 10 person teams who knew what they were doing, with the correct architecture and development tools, could have built a working system in 12-18mths.
Reading the report, I find it repulsive the financial penalties have been reduced to keep Capita 'motivated'. Our armed forces deserve better. With all the cost cutting they endure, they need to recruit quickly and efficiently and fill 100% of positions they have to maintain an effective defence of our country.
[+] [-] campercoder|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TokyoKid|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] corkscrew|7 years ago|reply